Luck/Turmoil versus Nothing.

[Squirrelloid]

They don't do the same thing at all.

Fortune teller prevents bad events *after* they are generated. (It also works against Baleful Star iirc, which Luck scales don't effect at all).

Luck scales biases the die roll when determining what event is generated. I believe that there is some list of all the events that could possibly be generated for your scales, ordered from 'best' to 'worst'. A die is rolled that determines which of these events happens. Luck/Misfortune biasses the die up or down the list.

[militarist]

There are standard combinations:
O3M2: O3 is obvious why, M1 would be better but M2 still reasonable.M3 - too small probability to get heroes if any, and, the most important, with this build taking DEATH scale is very risky because you switch on some events like plague, which can be gamechanging if happened in your capital early turns.
But you will anyway take this combination if you do not benefit too much from turmoil like pangaea or gem income events, like Kailasa or you have dominion which kills your population, like LA Rleh and Ermor and order in a long run has no much sense for you as you are not going to have population.

If you play nations were you can afford taking Turmoil, you can generate much more points.

You usually take Turmoil 3 Luck 3. It is 40 points better then O3M2.It is one plus. The second plus - you can take a risk and take Death , even Death 3. Which would be VERY risky in first scenario. So you can potentially get 80-120 more points from death.(80 because with 03M2 you can still take D1 without fatal risks).
So you can generate 120-160 points more points which can be spend anywhere.

Some people like to invest it in Magic1 or Magic3. My favorite builds for some nations and some game settings include Drain 3.

I like T3S3L3D3 for some bless nations.

You get A LOT of points, and you can have awake sorceress , with research 30-40 from first turn (idea is taken from Baal'z helheim guide), and perfect sitesearcher later, with any kinds of bless you need. dominion usually will be low, so if you have a neigbour with high Dom , you should kill him faster then he domkilled you. But with yuor advantage in points and early research you are usually stronger then anyone around in early game.

As result your dominion is not very useful, it's minus.But it's weak,it's a plus. You build a castle where you find good enemy dominion (Magic1 or Magic3). And send your mages there (through flying boots or anything else).
Enemy magic dominion makes the land more magical, and it works for your mages very well. For free. Your first mages you produced in capital you use for expansion instead of researching almost from the very beginning, as you have good early research and in your dominion doing research with mages may be not the best idea,though sometime you do this as well.You also can forge items with mages.

O0L0 is a strange combination, I would never take that- you either need money critically from beginning , then you always take O3. Or, in very special cases (which are especially rare because its very popular to in MP to play with rich settings which make difference between order and turmoil even deeper) you take turmoil with luck. Maybe I would take O0L0 in case I would want to take death scale for points, but still needed money for early expansion (Order/misfortune is risky with death as we remember). But I don't remember a situation from real life I would do it.

[Calahan]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

Surprised to see people arguing over this instead of just spending the two minutes it takes to test it. And yet again my pet hate of someone making a claim about a game mechanic without any test data to back it up. Even worse in this instance as the test game I already provided showed the date required for this. As Misfortune 3 is -39% Luck, so 140 Fortune Teller ability would be needed if the Luck scale stacked with Fortune Teller ability, and not the 100 that is successfully preventing all bad events in the test game I posted.


Anyway, attached is yet another save file that shows, as I said, the Luck scale and Fortune Teller ability do not stack with each other as they are two separate mechanics. Which is as Verjigorm and Squirrelloid pointed out in more detail in their posts.

The save game attached shows a Luck 3 province (so 39%) plus a total of 70 Fortune Teller ability, for a total of 109. Yet as the message log shows, an Earthquake just occurred. Which I'm pretty sure we can all agree on is a bad event.

[WingedDog]

Originally Posted by militarist

I like T3S3L3D3 for some bless nations.

You get A LOT of points, and you can have awake sorceress , with research 30-40 from first turn (idea is taken from Baal'z helheim guide), and perfect sitesearcher later, with any kinds of bless you need. dominion usually will be low, so if you have a neigbour with high Dom , you should kill him faster then he domkilled you. But with yuor advantage in points and early research you are usually stronger then anyone around in early game.

Could you give some more details please? Particulary about the nations, bless and ingame experience. The idea is interesting, but I can't tie some things together in my head:

1) Why sorceress? Great sage is cheaper and has a larger research bonus (if that's what this all is about).

2) You'll have really little money and resources, so your sacreds should be really cheap and naked, so Mictlans and MA Ermor are first nations coming to my mind.

3) It's really expensive to get domstr of a rainbow pretender above 6, which means no more then 6 cheap sacreds per turn. Will it be enough to get required critical mass fast enough for a rush?

4) Rainbow pretenders are good for taking multiple minor blesses, but getting a heavy bless with such a pretender is really expensive. With all the points from the negative scales you offer you can have either minor bless in many magic pathes or heavy bless in one path and minor blesses in couple of others (if I'm not mistaken, don't have access to the game right now to check). Will this bless be that effective so small ammount of cheap sacreds could roll over your closest neighbor fast enough and without heavy losses in the early game?

5) Wouldn't your dominion start to drag you down in midgame and later on? Researcher pretender is a good thing but Drain-3 would really slow down your research comparing to others at some point, and heavy turmoil and sloth would make hiring mages more difficult. I know money may come as a good event, but again they may not.

Don't get me wrong, I do not try to mock you, or play know-all. I really find the idea interesting, and want to learn more about particular ingame experience, and, perhaps, use it in my future games.

[RadicalTurnip]

Perhaps he's looking to bless his commanders. This could make sense with Niefelheim (I've done a fairly successful run with T3 S3 C3 Death3 L3 Drain2 dormant pretender with a somewhat low dominion (I think it was 4).

The key was that my 500-a-pop giants could take on pretty much any indie province (we were playing with Indies set to 9). Sure I didn't get one every turn, but every 3rd turn was fine, and that would have been more if I didn't build some researchers early. For research (eventually) I build Skull Mentors (2-a-turn for...a very long time) from all the death sites my expansion netted me (after killing a neighbor), while I researched up the Alteration tree so my giants could quicken themselves (I didn't take a water bless).

I wouldn't recommend my exact strategy, even though I ended up winning through some tricky use of a few giants up front guarding hoards of indy necromancers that I got lucky to find, each with a shroud and a skull staff (E10 bless), so they could summon skeletons for a long time. And spamming Wolven Winter. At least 5 a turn, everywhere I was getting ready to attack or feared being attacked that was outside my dominion.

[WingedDog]

RadicalTurnip

Thanks, building heavily blessed jarls, while pretender researches buffs really does ring the bell. That could work.
Never played Niefel.

[Gandalf Parker]

This might be a good place to mention that Nief needs a strat guide in the wiki. the only one there gets ridiculed (altho its not that bad if people will notice that its a solo guide, not an mp one)

[Squirrelloid]

Nief doesn't need a strategy guide. A drunk monkey could play Nieflheim. I mean, unless you're going to follow Baalz (and he wrote a great alternative strategy guide for them, even if it isn't wikified yet), the strategy guide is simply summed up as follows:

E9N4+ bless, build giants.

What else do you need to know? (Ok, I prefer Baalz's choices, but he already wrote that guide).

[RadicalTurnip]

I in no way consider myself good enough to write a strategy guide, I just got Dom III for Christmas, and am still playing around a lot with it. I would likely get eaten in a real MP game (I've only played with a group of up to 6 friends, and none of us have played any other MP Dominions besides each other).

Still, the E9 N4+ is pretty good for it...Nief, to me, is sorta a "See if we can kill them before they get counters" game, along with a slight "If I get way more territory, I can springboard into late-game before anyone else" kind of game. They feel weakest mid-game to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

[militarist]

Squirrelloid,there are 2 reasons not to play E9N4:
1.Fun. It is always nice to play builds which ALSO work.
2.Niefelheim is a strong nation, but if it would be possible to have two Niefelheims and one would be with T3S3L3D3 build and another with standard, on normal game settings and 12 provinces per player map, I believe T3S3L3D3 would win. Nations with small sacreds or sacreds with 2 attacks , which benefit heavily from S9 or W9 or F9 or even A9 can benefit more. For Niefels you can add W6, + minor blesses or 1-3 points in paths which you don't have natural access through mages for sitesearching and summons.

If it would be possible to play "standard" niefel build and T3S3L3D3 niefel build on a map with 12 provinces, I think player with standard build would have less chances to survive.

So the question is not "is the standard build is good?" but in what situations T3S3L3D3 build is preferable, or does this build create enough power initially to cover longterm looses (some if them can be managed though).

WingedDog, as classical example with this build with enchantress (not sorceress )can be Kailasa. Enchantress is good for strong or average E,A,S bless. Your sacreds are cheap, you can summon sacreds, bless benefits your sacred commanders.

As for great sage. I play only CBM. It's all about points. I like enchantress because is all most of my games I take E9, and enchantress has basic E and S points.E is the most popular 9 bless, S is good for lategame, for opening astral for some nations, S4-S6 bless is useful for any kind of sacreds, S9 is also not so bad, for such nations like Atlantis, Lanka (helps Lanka against tramplers as well!) and many small size sacreds.

And better bless, or better sitesearching abilities which gives you sitesearching path in paths you don't have natural access to, are more important then extra 5-10 points of research.

Any nation which can bet on summonable sacreds or sacred commander thugs is a good candidate.

As for little money and resources..If game settings are not too rich, and game fits to play with turmoil, the main minus of turmoil is a risk not to have enough income on early stage, when you NEED guaranteed income to buy commanders and sacreds each turn.
Ideally you should play test game to see what you can get and what Sloth you can afford.
As for money - it's a question of game settings, early heavy taxation of capital, and, of course, look if the nation you choose

As for domstr, I take 2-6 domstr. 2 is rarely, it's risky, and needs very heavy justification. But alive pretender compensate your early risks somehow, generating dominion from 1st turn.

As for using rainbow pretenders for level 9 bless..If you have at least 1 point n the path you want to be lvl 9, I believe it has a sense.

As for research - you will almost never research in magic negative land. You dominion is weaker then your neigbors, so you will usually have access to at least Magic-1 lands. And dues to faster expansion you will have more lands, more capitals, more gem income and more money. They should compensate lack of magic scale even if you are not very lucky with finding good magic land in a place, where you can produce mages or where you can transport them to without sacrificing too many turns on movement. But even transporting your mages to magic+ land can be not so bad, getting to account that you will have your mages on the border with one of your neighbors, creating a threat and peace of mind for thought about defense. You will ALWAYS have access to Drain-1-2 (which means magic minus 1) lands, which is already doesn't sound so frightening as drain 3.

As for dom 6 for early rush - 6 is definitely enough for most nation for early rush (especially in games where settings are not rich). If you can rely on thugs with 1-2 sacred bodyguards, you can live with lower, even very low dominion. Don't forget about early usage of your mages - with researching pretender you have early access to body etherial, destruction, wind guide and other early spells which will change a lot for your wars.